TECH FARM- combining technology and ancient techniques for making efficient agriculture

STEM Chat
, , , ,
1

This is the idea and project about collaboration of 4 projects we are currently discussing just we have to modify it and want to change its perspectives towards broader vision.

So, we are currently discussing 4 projectes on metastudio.

[center]

[/center]

[center]WEATHER STATION (forecast of environment)
MANGO MAPPING (data of tree)
ZERO GARBAGE (use of organic substitute)
OLFACTORY SENSOR (chemical composition)
AEROPONICS (growing plant without soil)[/center]

[center]

[/center]

So, here the thought to unite this model system.
weather station
model we need as it is and around that model we have to tweak other 3 projectes discussion.
Weather station is complete package for sensing all essential components which are required for farmers to do agriculture in good condition.
To brief

WEATHER STATION

It is the solid and budget friendly model by which we can predict weather near farm location and any where by which farmers can make predictions to grow various crops.
It has wifi module and we can operate it remotely.
From this we can get live data tracking by using IoT.
For more check the @Farhan post.

MANGO MAPPING

we all know our popular project mango mapping if we make advance chages to this by tracking field crops and various tree behaviour by using sensor and IoT we can get particular behaviour patterns of all plants.
It is very big and hard to do. But we are doing mango across all over country, so collabrative work will make this easy. Check out @drishtantmkawale post for more info

ZERO GARBAGE

It is simple but effective model. But simplicity makes it hard to do. In villages we have same dumping ground like we have in cities. But village dumping ground are in each house they manage their waste in their own yard. Means in my village in Latur, Maharashtra this dumping yard waste is organic we use this when we start new season of crop plantation. 10-15 trolley of tractor are occupied by 1 year waste. I don’t know the trolley volume property that’s why I mentioned trolley.
So, they create organic culture from the waste.
So zero garbage is similar model system with little changes for city.
You can check this on zero garbage post.

So, if we take this idea further and if we generate compost of waste in home.
Municipal corporation workers will collect compost from us and they will provide you the money of your compost. So, just think big and make zero garbage model simple and convenient.

OLFACTORY SENSOR

It is tricky one hard to crack. So, I included this in farming by changing it’s overall perspective.

Just for this neglect smell part and all will apply to this idea.
The objective of olfaction sensor to find chemical composition of various elements present in Environment.

AEROPONICS

It is method by which we can grow plants without soil check out @jtd sir post about this

So if we bring this idea to soil, like we have in villages soil testing. In agriculture institute the soil test is carried out and they make report and calculate various elements composition in soil and water holding capacity of soil.
From this report they suggest farmer
which crop they have to plant?
Which fertilizers and pesticides will be effective to that field?
What should be the water composition?
And how to increase carbon in soil?

So, this are the 4 topics if we Collab it and make this under seamless model system it will helpful for all farmers in India.
In foreign countries they have lot of high tech missionary.
They use drone,plane and all crary gadgets to grow their yield.
But we have to make changes in farming carefully and wisely.
This is the tech part.
But we have to manage Nature, Human, Technology relation and maintain the balance between this systems.
Just like we are uniting ideas we have to unite them.

So, how to increase natural ways?

By applying ancient times techniques for farming. No tilling, minimum chemicals and approach towards organic farming.
We have some models across the country which do farming by this method.
So, I briefly complete it
No till is the method where we don’t use tractors or bullocks to make brackets to plant tree. We just plant seed properly in equidistant by making holes in measured field.
And we use various plants and different fruits or vegetables to create pesticides or compost as a mannuer for crops. And when this crop are ready we just remove the part which is essential like wheat, rice, etc.
And remaining we keep in field as it is and convert this residue in compost by using bio culture and organic culture.
Because of this traditional method the carbon level of field is increases and water holding capacity and nutrients of soil in increase.

So, we have to combine to make continuous one system. Just to say we don’t need smart farm we need efficient farm that’s why I used tech which represents both technical and traditional techniques.

We can do this if we do this it can also be tech farm revolution like green and white revolution. Just think like this we can start from ourselves then rest will follow it.

6 Likes
2

We forget the energy part and loadshedding is their in every village

We need 24hrs electricity
Just check alternative which are efficient and effective to for water pumping and other farming solution.

3

Two methods:

  1. Pump using gravity feed

  2. Battery backed Solar pump

The first method you construct a tank at a height and pump water whenever power is available into the tank. Then let gravity do the distribution.
The second method one uses a battery charged by a solar panel. One can optionally use the overhead tank too.
One can have valves / sluice gates controlled by an intelligent system to provide precise amounts of water based on soil moisture content. One could additionally add nutrients into the mix.

In the case of irrigation where water release timings are arbitrary and inconvenient one can make a sump tank, then use the above techniques.

1 Like
4

‘Smell’ is the olfactory sense, not fully understood in humans, but certainly linked in some broad fashion to the presence of chemicals, both elements and compounds.

Since the human process of detecting chemicals is not fully understood, I suggest that the word ‘smell’ is a little deceptive. But we do get the general idea, that we want to identify the chemicals present in the immediate environment, by the simplest and most cost effective means. And we also want to try and quantify these observations.

The first might be relatively simple, but the second is not.

By relatively simple, I mean that we can investigate, for instance, the accuracy of gas chromatography, by extended trials, using a smartphone camera and a laser pointer. Fixing up a mechanism to use such tools is not a hugely difficult task, but it does call for precision, as we need to either exhaust the observation chamber of unwanted chemicals prior to running a sample, or at least always run a background check as a first step, in order to discount the chemicals already present.

We should also be able to access a reliable and complete spectrograph of common chemicals, in open digital form, so that the finished device can deliver results in plain language.

The sum of all these efforts needs to be presented in a how-to manual.

1 Like
5

The initial thoughts presented here appear to rely quite a lot on the industrial world.

Many of these suggestions already have locally sourced alternatives. Tanks, for instance, can be built at regular intervals wherever soil conditions favour natural storage. Piping is fairly easy to make, from both bamboo and woven grasses, and only necessary where open canals are difficult to route. Pumps may be substituted with lift irrigation, manually operated, built of wood.

The real world problems that will be encountered in some regions of India are not that of materials, but of human societal imperatives. For instance, where landholding is fractured and larger plots are managed by contract (as against self-use), allocation of suitable lands for tanks needs a great deal of local cooperation, overcoming centuries of ownership traditions.

2 Likes
6

No we are not considering it as smell we just get idea from my OLFACTORY SENSOR post to interlink.
It is different we just taking it as soil composition testing by spectroscopy or other efficient method

7

Overhead tank is good
But for solar energy setup now it is for 7lakh and 3lakh subsidy given by government and quality is not good.
Can we build renewable sustainable source which can give energy for 5years.
I talked with my father they said electricity is the problem. In our village we get 6-7 hrs of electricity daily for water pumps and other big uses and solar is costly.
So, they need budget friendly method they said 50k to 1lakh is ok to invest in energy which will provide energy for water pumping and 1 house.
Overhead tank is temporary solution

8

Cost will depend totally on the pump.
What is the capacity of the pump?
What is the amount of water to be used in irrigation?
For what period is water available if it is from an irrigation canal?
Is there overlap between power cut and irrigation water availability?

A CG miniganga .5hp pump capacity is approx 1200lph at a head of 10 M. Rs.3000/-
A 400W panel costs approx Rs.8000/- MPPT controller Rs.1500/-, 500va Inverter Rs.3500/- , 100AH battery Rs.8000/- (approx 3hrs), trolley to mount the whole lot and make it movable Rs.3000/-

Total below 20K. Add tank cost.
Note: I dont have the faintest clue about the amount of water required in a cane farm of 1 acre.

9

We use 5 hp motor used for 6acre land total farm is 8acre.
We have 3 parts in this
2acre
4acre and
2acre
All fields have sugarcane we are now using 5hp motor to pump the water from well
So we have pipeline across all farms just we needed electricity to pump water and for household use.
Now it is their but from 1month electricity not their in villages Sandol, Latur Maharashtra
And every time loadshedding problem is their across district.
This problem is common across the country.
So we need electricity substitute.
Just tell us for 5hp motor what will be the cost for solar system

1 Like
10

Multiplying by 10, since your pump is 10 times bigger cost would scale to 2 lacs. IMO it would be cheaper as the costs drop as wattage increases. The government’s figures are definetly off the scale. Nonetheless obtain a BOM of the government’s package. About 2yars ago a 10Kw grid tied installation - no batteries - costed around 6 lacs in Uran. 10Kw would drive 3 5HP pumps.

1 Like
11

Sorry, by ‘tank’ I meant pond. Tank is a word used in many parts of India.

Water in a ground level tank will probably not be directly useful for irrigation without energy. But it might be useful to consider alternatives to electricity, for a lot of reasons to do with both costs and ecology. That’s a whole subject in itself.

For each subsection to be irrigated, it might be worth exploring (this is a suggestion) the cost and effort needed to put up a small (depending on the amount of water needed for that section, and the crop) elevated tank. This can be filled using lift irrigation, with energy coming either from human effort or animal. The lift irrigation mechanism is much easier to build with local materials, primarily wood, and so is the small tank, than the externally manufactured and supplied solar energy installation. It doesn’t actually have to be ‘overhead’, just elevated enough to allow the water to flow by gravity, whenever necessary (simple go-nogo valve, basically a stopper).

1 Like
12

Soil Sensor

1 Like
13

I found one research paper which has some information regarding how it will be useful for farmers in drought and to manage water properly
SOIL_MOISTURE_SENSOR.pdf (662.4 KB)

14

Not necessarily. Will depend on tank and how much design control you have. May not be much with a pond at some distance from field, but a tank on the field is another story.

A quick and dirty hack for this could be a slowly leaking plastic tank sunk into the ground, with holes for water to seep through, basically creating an artificial water table closer to the surface locally. A more well designed hack would be for those holes to be connected to underground perforated irrigation pipes to extend the area where water seeps through. An even more elegant fix would be for the irrigation pipes to sit in a channel that prevents water from simply going down and let’s it pool so that it can wick up towards the roots.

Remeber, plants ARE pumps. Solar powered biological pumps, sure, but they pump up water from root to tip very efficiently. You don’t need the surface wet. As long as the roots touch water, they will handle the rest.

And because it is me and I am addicted to design sketches, maybe these pictures are three thousand words?

IMG20210112222650_compress38
IMG20210112222650_compress384160×3120 796 KB

IMG20210112222654_compress46
IMG20210112222654_compress464160×3120 732 KB

IMG20210112222658_compress97
IMG20210112222658_compress974160×3120 830 KB

1 Like
15

Simple experiment to see how this would work. You can also modify experiment by adding perforated straw, to see increase in irrigation efficiency, etc.

IMG20210112230249_compress58
IMG20210112230249_compress584160×3120 954 KB

2 Likes
16

What @Vidyut describes is larger scale “pot” irrigation, where pots with a small hole at the bottom are buried alongside plants and filled with water once a week. There is even “wick” irrigation, where cotton/jute ropes are buried below the plants and topsoil heat sucks water from lower soil through the wicks. Planting crops in concentric circles around ponds with thirsty plants in the inner circles is a great idea. A variant is planting crops in concentric circles around trees (e.g. Vaanagam in Tamilnadu, where a food forest was created in 100 acres of water-scarce dryland).

While there are techniques for reduced water use in sugarcane farming (after initial months, fill up alternate trenches with soil and plant vegetables etc. there, since sugarcane needs lesser water in its later months), it doesn’t sound like a good idea to grow sugarcane in areas without rivers, especially when sugar isn’t that great for health. Jaggery, sure, but do we really need to grow as much sugarcane (and rice) as we do?

2 Likes
17

A March 2023 paper Sounds emitted by plants under stress by Israeli agriculture scientists show that ultrasonic signals are created from the plant under drought and cutting stress; they observe : The mean number of sounds emitted by dry tomato was 35.4 per hour and cut tomato emitted 25.2 sounds per hour. In contrast, the mean number of sounds emitted by plants from all the control groups was lower than 1 per hour.; and discuss: plants emit remotely detectable and informative airborne sounds under stress… plant sound emissions could offer a way for monitoring crops water and possibly disease states—questions of crucial importance in agriculture. We can start a project for IoT sound sensors and Apps for analysing the sound signals of plants and predict the status, not only stress,. Let us listen to and record the “whispering of wind when it blows through the trees and grasses”. The whisper should indicate at a distance from the plant: the strength of wind, the rainfall intensity, and the wilting of the leaves.